Katherine Heigl and Jeffrey Dean Morgan reunited for the first time in years as part of Entertainment Weekly’s 20th anniversary of Shondaland and got brutally honest about one of “Grey’s Anatomy’s” worst storylines: Ghost sex. The romance between Heigl’s Izzie and Morgan’s Denny in Season 2 bolstered the show’s popularity and powered Heigl to an Emmy win. Denny died in the season finale, but his Season 5 return as a ghost Izzie sees and has sex with confused the actors as much as it did the viewers.
“It’s funny because I don’t remember much of that season because it just… I don’t know that anybody thought that was working when we were doing it,” Morgan admitted to EW, with Heigl calling the storyline “awkward.”
“It was confusing for everyone,” Heigl said. “There’s one particular scene that I will not watch with my children ever. I don’t care how old they are. I don’t care if they’re 60, I’m not watching this with them. And it was a scene where you’re in the room, but I’m trying to be like, ‘You are not here, you’re not here.’ And Alex [Justin Chambers] and Izzie start messing around and he goes down on her. And you’re just standing there. And I was just sort of at the time like, ‘This is what the money’s for, right?'”
“It started airing while we were still shooting the story, and we knew that the audience reaction wasn’t that excited about, ‘What? She’s seeing a dead guy? What the fuck is going on?’ Morgan added as Heigl replied: “She’s fucking a dead guy? What?”
The season eventually revealed that Izzie had a brain tumor, which was causing her to hallucinate Denny. The explanation made Heigl more receptive to the storyline, but she always thought it was too confounding for the kind of show “Grey’s Anatomy” was set up to be.
“For me, I loved Izzie and I wanted her to get to have that with Denny,” Heigl said. “And so there was part of me that loved it and wanted to do it, and wanted to see her have that, even if it was just a fantasy. But yeah, because there was this supernatural aspect of it, like you’re saying, it wasn’t necessarily in the realm of ‘Grey’s Anatomy.'”
“I remember Shonda talking to me about it,” she continued. “She referenced an old movie where the actress was sick and hallucinating. Because at first I didn’t know why she was seeing him, and no one would tell me. And I was like, ‘So is he an actual ghost or is it a hallucination or what’s happening?’ No one would tell me because it was super secretive, but then she revealed like, ‘No, it’s a manifestation of this illness.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so sad.'”
Head over to Entertainment Weekly’s website to read more from Heigl and Morgan’s reunion interview.
